Some of you may have noticed I am prone to hyperbole. When I said that someone fingerbanged me for seven hours, it may have been only three. Equally I do not really think E. Jean Carroll is a lush. So when I said that I saw someone ‘wearing a checked 3 piece vintage suit, and covered in old school tattoos… listening to Kanye West’ I didn’t actually think we’d be suitable life partners. Sure, he was hot, ludicrously, jaw droppingly, hot, and it seemed there was an overlap in our interests (fine tailoring, good music), but I’d never spoken to him and probably never would.

Those of you who were not well-acquainted with my penchant for ridiculous exaggeration, and falling in love at the drop of a hat, became rather obsessed with the idea that I had a list. That’s right: a list. Because life really does echo Sex and The City, I mean art, and women do indeed carry around lists inside their minds which obsessively detail what their prospective partner should be like. This is why we’re always hounding you guys to get jobs, settle down, cut your hair and nagnagnagnagnagnag. Lol. Lol. Omg. Wtf. Lol. I love the colour pink! Men suck! Women are bitches! Let me file my nails while you talk to me. OMG. BBQ.

Ahem.

As you can guess I did not find it amusing that people assumed I was going out with a strict checklist of things I want in a man. That kind of thinking a) only exists in the one-dimensional characters that chick-lit writers create, b) is utterly pointless. Of course I have preferences but they’re hardly unreasonable. I would like to be attracted to a person I want to be in a committed relationship with. I tend to find that my crushes are either tall thin men with acres of shaggy dark hair or long limbed women with bee stung lips. Preferably I would like my partner and I to share a few common interests: at the moment I am obsessed with ASAP Rocky, Emile Zola, Humphrey Bogart movies, and okonomiyaki. I’d like to think there’s something there for everyone.

Dating someone ignorant, misogynistic, racist, xenophobic, or homophobic,would, obviously, be a nightmare. No young Tories for me, thank-you. It would be nice if my partner was good with money, as I am abso-fucking-lutely awful with it, just as it’d be lovely if they liked cats and dogs, but one or the other is a bare minimum. Despising children is almost certainly a deal breaker, even though I am not sure I want any of my own. Lastly: funny. I just cannot go on another date with someone devoid of a sense of humour or, and I think this is worse, who genuinely enjoys watching Two Pints of Lager and a Packet of Crisps. Last of all I would really prefer to date someone who loves food as much as I do, because there are few things I like doing more than eating and making sex noises at the same time.

While these are enviable traits in anyone, I would like to point out that they do not always translate into qualities my squeezes have. My last serious relationship was with someone who liked bee-bop, was almost as bad with money as I am, felt ambivalent around animals, and uncomfortable around children. The one before that was the same height as me and liked cats and Huggy Bear more than he liked me. The thing is this is an ideal: a fantasy world where I look like Elizabeth Taylor, all my jokes are puke inducingly funny, and I rarely if ever have to fart. Even the shonkiest life coach will tell you to dream big because when you do you end up getting either what you want or something that is as good if not better. I’m not delusional, I know that some things are out of reach. And yeah I might not win the Nobel Prize for Literature or own the house from Ferris Bueller, but I can dream can’t I?

Painting by Amos Sewell for The Saturday Evening Post, January 1960 and photo of Paz de la Huerta by Mark Seliger.
Blog post title from this Franz Ferdinand song.  

Maddalena: I love you Marcello. I want to be your wife. Be faithful. I want it all: to be your wife, and enjoy myself like a whore.
Marcello: Tonight, I don’t know why, I felt like I loved you, like I needed you.
Maddalena: Really?
Marcello: Really. I’m not sure if you’re being serious tonight, or playing games with me. But it doesn’t matter. I love you. I want to be with you always.
Maddalena: After a month you’d hate me.
Marcello: Why should I hate you?
Maddalena: Because no-one can have everything. You can’t have one thing or the other. You have to choose. And I can’t choose, it’s too late. I have never wanted to choose. I’m a whore, there’s no cure. I’ll always be a whore, and I don’t want to be anything else!

If there’s one thing I hate, it’s complicated, subtitled films in black and white. Give me The House Bunny over Les Bonnes Femmes any day. This is partly because I have bad eyesight and mostly because I’m an uncultured cretin. However I speak Italian fluently, so I can just about stomach watching Cinecittá’s 60s output, and last year I discovered La Dolce Vita. Just so you know, in no way am I qualified to even begin explaining the beauty, sadness, and the frustration that watching La Dolce Vita inspires. There are people with whole dissertations based around the dead fish washing up on shore, or Marcello’s stupidly beautiful face. All I want to talk about is the above conversation, because for the last few months it’s been on my mind.

It’s obvious that men love whores, I mean someone’s got to be fucking them or they wouldn’t be whores, but there is the idea that marriage or a long term relationship involves some kind of subduing: that you have to be a ‘good girl’. That is to say that men adore whores, but only when they stop being whores. Even though I tell myself someone who wants to change me is not worth my time, when I am in a relationship I tend to feel the urge to curb my drinking, stop shouting in clubs, or dancing on tables, and to make more nice dinners, because that’s what you do, right?

And even though nice dinners are well, uh, nice, I’ve decided that the next time I somehow fall into some kind of relationship I will not try and be the good girl that society tells me to be, and that I don’t have to make a choice. After all, why did they fall for me in the first place? Because underneath my chatty Cathy exterior lies the quivering heart of a good homemaker? Unlikely. No, they fell for me because I am a gobby tart, and if I’m honest with myself ‘I’ll always be a whore, and I don’t want to be anything else!’

It’s difficult to explain exactly what is bugging me at the moment because I don’t want to sound like a big headed bitch. It’s probably best to just throw it out there, as is, no bullshit, and see how it goes. The problem is this: everyone keeps flirting with me. Now, before you roll your eyes too hard, it seriously is a drag. It’s got to the point where today, at a zipline thing with my preteen sister and parents, the instructor flirted with me so hard even my mother commented on it. I did nothing at all to warrant this, I was even wearing green trousers with an elasticated waist and he still wouldn’t let up. I’m in a harness climbing on a fucking metal wire strung between two trees and he’s saying “Aww you’re mean”. Mean? Dude I am looking after children. Go away.

Fuck it man, I can’t even write this. What the hell am I thinking? This is a temporary glitch, a buzzy moment in the matrix where everything is good, and I am a Simon Templar sex beast. What the hell am I whining about? Knowing other people find me attractive is so lovely and ego inflating it’s insane, but equally, Jesus fucking Christ it’s tiring. I mean I’m not Helena Christensen, I’m not Shia LeBoeuf, I’m me, a kinda hot, kinda silly girl with enormous hair and a squishy nose. I’m just not used to it. How do super mega buff girls with shiny legs and bouncy hair deal with this? Do they ever just deliberately smear a bit of mascara down their cheek and rub dirt into their fringe?

I keep wanting to justify this with stuff like: “I mean obviously I don’t get hit on at the shop” but it depends who’s serving. “So not everyone in the entire world is hitting on me” well duh, I don’t think you all thought I was that fucking vain. Of course there are a million caveats, because even though I seem to be man-nip right now, I’m obviously not to every single person in the whole world’s fucking tastes. At first I thought that maybe I was just going out more (true), talking to strangers more (true), and probably just being super gregarious but the zipline guy has blown those theories out of the water.

While I’m here rambling: can I tell you all a story about being called gregarious? Of course I can, it’s my blog! I can do what the fuck I like! So I was at this Christmas party thing in a pub, and there’s this creepy guy staring at me all freaking night. And he keeps coming over and trying to talk to me, but his eyeballs are kinda huge and bulgy, and the staring thing kind of freaks me out, so I’m not best keen on a chat. Being drunk me and my friend Hannah start dodging him all over the crowded pub until I’m hiding under a chair, hidden by a coat, which is being guarded by my friend Dennis. Mr Eyeballs grabs Dennis and says “It’s…. very…. important you tell your friend… that…. she’s becoming… gregarious.” And then on that bombshell he leaves the pub. Straight out, no goodbyes, just leaves. Firstly, I didn’t know what the hell gregarious meant. Nor did anyone I was with. Secondly: What??? That’s what you were eye stalking me all night for? I’m gregarious? You need help mate. Best thing is: five years later I met him again and dated him. He’s the lean-er! There’s no moral to this, although if I had to find one it’d be: don’t date guys who stare a lot.

Where were we? Oh yeah: people keep flirting with me and it’s freaking me out. Really, what I want, is one super awesome person to flirt with me and make out, and hold hands and fly in a cotton candy sky with, because at heart, I love being monogamous; it is for me, the best thing I can imagine. However right now it seems every cool person I meet and want to be friends with at some point starts pawing at me, and then everything feels shitty, and like the only reason they’ve been laughing at my jokes is because they want to get their end away. It makes everything feel really cheap and shitty. It’s nice to feel wanted, but rather than feeling flattered that they want me that much, I just feel fucked off that they can’t look at me as anything other than clunge in a nice dress. Obviously I can’t stop people wanting to fancy me, I just wish I could. Because there’s nothing worse than someone howling themselves silly at your anecdotes to find out that they’ve been thinking “Skip to the end, I’d like to see your tits please.”

Illustration by Hellen Jo

There are many things I’d like to chalk up to the foolishness of youth: dying my hair Andy Warhol blonde, developing a taste for MDMA, enjoying The Killers, wearing skirts as dresses; we all do silly things when our heads are full of hot air and weed. However there is one thing that is slightly hard to reconcile with the oh so mature and sophisticated modern me, something I like to call ‘acting like a sex crazed nutter’.

As far as I’m aware: we’ve all done it. Everyone’s sent one too many text messages, gone somewhere they just ‘happened’ to bump into someone else, or cursed out an unsuspecting lady on a date with someone you thought you were bumming. It happens to all of us, yes, but it doesn’t make the memory of it any easier to deal with. As someone who is both impulsive, prone to irrational thoughts, and in posession of an unstable mind I have been known to push the buck a little further than most with my sketchy moments.

In the interests of both sharing, and brevity, I thought I’d give you a handy dandy list of my top craziest moments, and advise you not to repeat any of them if you want to retain someone’s sexual/emotional services for more than 20 minutes.

- Immediately after someone asked me for my number I said to them “Are you actually going to call? Or are you just taking my number because you think it’s something you should do? Because if you’re not going to call don’t bother, yeah?” They didn’t take my number, at which point I said. “Fine. Actually, you know what? Fuck you. I don’t need you.” Please note this was the morning after we had had sex, and outside a tube station.

- After being bombarded from all sides with the idea that men are some breed of sex hound that will follow you round with their tongue out begging you for carnal moments, but only if you don’t give them it, I devised what I thought was a fool proof way to snag a man. It was possibly the shittest and most utterly mental thing I have ever done. I met a guy, went back to his house, spent all night naked and making out, then refused to have sex with him. The next morning I was so convinced I’d snagged him (and I suspect both drunk and delirious after only 1 hour’s sleep) I sat, in my underwear, on his lap and showered in him kisses, while grinning like a lunatic, and saying things like “This is so fun!” Surprisingly he never did call me ever ever again. Last time I saw him he crossed the road.

- There is a time between starting to date someone and seeing them officially, when you are always well groomed, smelling wonderful, and a chipper little camper in their presence. This can take hours of work, and so there is nothing worse than being unexpectedly ambushed by them when you are hungover, in a ripped stained t-shirt, with greasy hair. However the answer is not to try and hide between two displays of jeans, facing the wall because all that will happen is the person you are seeing will come over to you and say “Vanessa? Is that you?” and you’ll have to turn around from the wall and say “Oh yeah….Hey.” and you will never be their girlfriend.

- Once a man snuck out my house while I was asleep without leaving his number, a note, or saying goodbye. While I don’t really remember very clearly what happened when I saw him a week later I think that it was possibly violent, definitely involved shouting, maybe some kicking, and depressingly a large amount of paraphrased Pulp Fiction quotes while being pulled backwards along a bar by two middle aged rock-a-billy guys. Don’t do that to someone ok? Don’t fucking do it you fucking cowardly little cuntbucket. What the hell is wrong with you? You can play genital hopscotch but you can’t say goodbye? What the fuck is wrong with you? Don’t act fucking surprised if you’re crying by the end of your next meeting with this person because you know what? You fucking deserved it. You fucking shit. You are scum. Don’t try and tell yourself you’re not, because you are. You suck. You fucking suck.

- On a lighter note: once I was trying to lie to a boyfriend why I was late for a date with him, and wrote a text saying “I’m stuck in Selfridges with Alex [my wonderful best friend] and he won’t let me leave till he’s shown me some godawful crap. Soz.” but instead of sending it to the boyfriend I sent it to Alex. Thankfully Alex knew I was lying and was very nice about it.

- While being drunk can be really condusive to good flirting, it can also be the kiss of death. Having spent all evening hitting on someone who I thought was being fairly receptive, I went to the bathroom to do my lipstick, and came back to find them asleep. After trying to wake them for a bit, then getting his friends to try and wake him I wrote my name and number on a piece of paper and put it in his pocket. He never called.

- Last of all: never, ever, ever, ever leave a voicemail that is more than 1 minute long. Please. Firstly no-one will listen to it. Secondly, just don’t. Especially if the voicemail is 10 solid minutes of you screaming at them for being a dick, and calling them every name under the sun until your best friend wrestles the phone off you and confiscates it for the rest of the evening. You don’t need that on your conscience even if at the time you were pretty convinced they deserved it.

As I moult both friends, readers, and potential dates after this post I’d like to think I’ve been topped by other crazy people out there. That thought alone is something I cling to in my darker hours.

Photos from Seventeen (1954) via That Sentimental Feeling and Lauren Rue (though I don’t know where she got it from!)

Has anyone ever told you that they are a ‘people person’? Have you ever met that rare breed of person who thinks that the world is full of wonder, light, and people who are ready to love you and open their arms wide with happiness? If you have, then I’m sorry. I feel your pain deeply. Because, as you may have guessed – I am not one of those people.

Once, a long, long, time ago, I told a friend, “The difference between you and me is that I like the general public, and you don’t.” A moment of silence followed and then he replied “You hate the general public!” and suddenly the veil fell from my eyes. I do hate the public. I hate most people in fact. All through my teenage years I wanted people to like me and did everything I could to gain their acceptance. However as I have begun approaching the fine old age of 30 I have started to realise that I don’t give a flying fuck what most people think, do, say, or eat. I just don’t like many people.

As a newly single girl this is proving to be rather problematic. I recently reactivated my OkCupid profile and, it seems, my hatred for almost everything under the sun. Pseuds. People who like Mogwai. MOGWAI. Ugh. Long hair. Earnest people. Buffy superfans. Closet racists. Men who don’t wear good shoes. Cat haters. ‘Nice’ guys (if you think you’re a ‘nice’ guy, you’re not – you’re a twat). I’m enjoying writing this list way too much so I’ll stop, but you get the point – I hate a lot of stuff and it’s the kind of stuff that most people seem to love.

Most people on OkC are looking for someone to sit in a fair trade ecological cafe with on a Sunday so they can read The Guardian together. I can imagine nothing worse. They want to go to gigs where they stand up all the way through and listen to the droning sound of live music. They will probably wear fleeces when they get to 37. They might even like subtitled films. Why do you want to read when you’re watching a film? Get a book! They probably want to be there in the room with me when I give birth to their earnest potato faced child. (Note: I am very much against my future baby Daddy being in the room with me when I give birth, don’t know why, I just am). It’s all too horrible to think about.

Now don’t get me wrong I like a lot of stuff too but it’s stuff that is pretty polarising: 60s fad dances, Russ Meyer films, Kraft Mac & Cheese, Garth Mahrenghi’s Dark Place. Not exactly the kind of stuff that normally engenders a lively and stimulating discussion. In fact most of the time when I attempt to talk to men about the things I’m interested in their faces either glaze over very quickly or they pat me on the head and say “You’re so cute!”. Let’s get one thing straight: DON’T FUCKING PAT ME ON THE HEAD. What is with this? I’m not short, I’m not sweet, and I don’t look like a small animal. Yet almost everyone I fancy tries, at some point, to pat me on the head. I hate it! I’m a twenty-seven year old woman! Is it my penchant for Peter Pan collars?

People who hate people aren’t generally people who end up being in happy relationships. They end up bitter, alone, and writing angry emails from their suburban flat above a hairdressers. And I don’t want that, I don’t. I’ve tried to like the kind of things that nice, normal people like. But I can’t. British Sea Power bring me out in hives. Artisan bread makes my eyes water. Square toed shoes get my gag reflex going. I tried. I really did.

This isn’t to say that I hate other people wanting those things, or that you should all be clammed up inside if someone wants to go to a Stephen Malkmus gig (I’ve been to one – it was… uh… it was ok…) because if those things make you happy then that’s wonderful! It’s not like you’re kicking puppies or taunting old ladies – these things are good, normal, natural things to like. The people who like them are good, normal, wonderful people. But I don’t want that. I want my Richard Burton. I want someone who makes me feel like I’m riding in a fast car shooting guns at mailboxes. For once I want to feel an emotion that makes me so, so, something, I haven’t quite figured out what, but so something that I’ll puke. I want my Tallulah Bankhead. I want it all! I want someone exceptional! Someone who makes me feel like I’m on fire! Someone who wants to set the world alight with me. And I can’t do that while reading the style supplement.

There’s no moral to this blog post: I wish I could tell you all that I believe that there is someone out there who hates everyone else but loves me, but I just don’t know if that’s true. I wish I could tell you that in time I will start liking things that other people like, but I won’t. I just want to know there are more people out there, people who look at everything they’re supposed to want and feel ill, because if there’s someone else out there who feels as cantankerous as I do then I guess I’m not really alone.

Photos from Girl With A One Track Mind’s Flickr and Tavi’s Tumblr.

While on the bus to work a couple of days ago I sat near two old ladies. They were discussing the reasons women were marrying later and later, and sometimes not at all. It was, they reasoned, because women were too picky. Back in their day (I have no idea how old they were, but they had pure white hair and milk bottle glasses, so old old?) girls learned to love someone in time, instead of expecting to be in love straightaway. Cute huh? It’s like Stockholm Syndrome but with roses. Awww. This ‘expecting true love lunacy’ is because apparently we women go around with a check-list in our heads, trying to find people who will check all the boxes.

This got me to thinking what I want in a boyfriend, and the list I came up with was pretty ridiculous in retrospect. Here is a what I decided:

• Must dress well. No sandals, no ‘witty’ t-shirts, no polar fleece.
• Interesting teeth.
• Funny or witty but not wacky or zany.
• Taller than me.
• Likes comics.
• Does not have a wiry beard. Or wiry leg hair.
• Listens to decent music, possibly not everything I like because that would be odd, but a nice overlap would be good.
• Not sweaty.
• Does not exercise or talk about eating healthy.
• Likes animals but in a normal way.
• Does not scowl at children.

As you can see it was a lot easier to think about what he wouldn’t be like than what he would be. Although if he looked like this I wouldn’t care what he acted like. Phwoar.

For all I know ‘he’ might turn out to be a woman, after all as Patrick Wolf says “I don’t know whether I’m destined to live my life with a horse, a woman or a man.” Nobody does really, you never know who you’re going to fall in love with or when or why, that’s the ‘great’ thing about it. My mother fancies Keanu Reeves and yet she got married to my Dad who is smart, skinny, and very English. Who you’re going to fall for is a totally unfathomable mystery! Only I do hope it’s not the horse.

When I was a teenager I thought I wanted fast cars, fast people, bright lights and the big city. My life was so mundane that I wanted someone to come and sweep me away into a new one. So I waited patiently for someone to spin my world around but they didn’t come. My brain constantly resembled a Louise Rennison book: hearts on everything, glitter drenched rainbows over all my dreams. Despite being SO SO IN LOVE all the time I was terrified that someone prettier, or cooler, or smarter, or skinnier, would come along all the time. After all what could anyone want with me when they could be with some raven headed pixie girl who ran her own magazine from the garret of a Georgian mansion?

Biding my time hoping to be dazzled made me bored and grumpy: I was now in my twenties and still waiting. Every day was unbearable. Then I had a revelation. One evening, a shitty rainy Wednesday, against my better judgement I went to see a gig with a friend. At 4am I was standing wrapped in a nothing but a shower curtain on a burning hotel mattress while skinheads danced around me trying to douse the flames with brandy, all of us singing and laughing. And that’s when I realised it: I could be my own adventure.

Maybe it shouldn’t have taken causing a few grand’s worth of damage to an innocent hotel room to realise that but it did. No-one was going to come along and ‘save’ me because I didn’t need saving. All the excitement I wanted was there for the taking: I just needed to reach out and touch it. I’m not saying it’s been some smooth ride since then, nor am I going to claim that my life is a high octane thrill ride, but it’s a damned sight better than looking at every face trying to figure out if they are the one who’s going to inject the glamour into my life. The reason I was so scared of that girl in the garret? She was out there, doing things, not waiting to be found, and I was horribly jealous.

It is killing me to type this, it really is, but waiting to be driven appears to be a, whisper it, girl thing. Boys don’t seem to plan on a jazzy girl coming along and changing everything in their life, unless they’re in an indie film, and then it’ll just be to teach them to get in touch with their feelings (don’t mind me while I barf over here). I don’t want to use the words ‘knight in shining armour’ but that’s exactly what it is.  Whether it’s Josh in Clueless rescuing Cher from a life of braindead inanity, or Robin saving Helen from a lifetime of bogey eating in Wetlands, there’s always a man ready to take the wheel and continue the drive. Even in adverts women are constantly being rescued.

But what happens after the credits roll? Once you’ve finished being thankful for your saviour where do you go from there? When I meet my Future Baby Daddy I don’t want to kick it while he decides the course; I want us to be co-pilots, bobsledders, tandem cyclists, or possibly even runners in a three legged race. If I’m hammering this point a bit much it’s because it’s important!! All these stupid dating books I’m reading (for you! not for me! I hate them!), and all the advice I get from my friends, tells me that if I wait ‘he’ will come. Why do I have to wait? If I can take control of my life in every other way then why can’t I take control here? Waiting turns us into slaves to romance. Waiting makes fools of women, it takes us back to the predator/prey idea of relationships, and belittles the efforts that we make to meet someone new.

It’s hard not waiting, almost as hard as waiting, and there are books, tv shows, and nosey old ladies on the bus, who are going to tell you “When you least expect it, they’ll come along, and then everything’ll change!” but I’d rather be getting on with my life and living it the best way I know how, than counting the days on my calendar until he comes along.

Photos by Yann Faucher, blog title stolen from Heartsrevolution‘s awesome song C.Y.O.A

Once, at my parents’ annual New Year’s Day party, a friend of the family asked why I was still single. Though the first thing I wanted to say was “Why are you still such a nosy bitch?” but instead I smiled politely and said I hadn’t met the right person. As I turned to get more eggnog she grabbed my arm, “You wait, once you get a steady job, and stop going to bars, then you’ll meet someone.” And then she stuffed another nacho in her mouth and grinned around it. Now, thanks to that harridan, two thoughts run through my head when I snuggle into my bed: that it’s fucking awesome to have the a big old bed to myself, and that the reason it’s all to myself is because I’m looking in all the wrong places.

But no! I won’t kowtow to her damned armchair psychology! This philosophy is wrong on so many levels. It’s down on bars, drinking, and finally anyone who’s ever set foot in a bar. In the past bars were just places to get drunk and pick up, but now it’s different. Where else am I going to go see bands? Sure there are gigs in places that you don’t serve alcohol (Wavves in Stokey Fire Station was pretty amazing actually) but they are the minority. Anyway what’s wrong with bars? They play music, serve drinks that taste like liquidized lovehearts, and hold more people than my front room. Also, I am not going to meet someone in my front room, and if I do he’s probably going to kill me or rape me because how the fuck did he get in there?

This isn’t to say I spend all my time in bars, or even a lot of time in them, it’s just that they have so far been an effective way of meeting people. Two drinks, some music, stare at each other across a room and things just happen, things happen that don’t at a bowling lane or a gallery. In fact attempting to pick someone up in a supermarket would make me feel like I was in Choke, you know? Having said that I have always been sort of impressed at sex addicts’ epic ways of hooking up, it seems so hard until you have an addiction, and then there is sex everywhere like a supermarket of perversion. (Fuck how great would a supermarket of perversion be? Anyone want to help me make that happen?)

Some of you will probably say that I can meet people at work. Nope sorry. I work in fashion (did I really did say that? Did I just become a fashion person? Argh!!) and the stereotype that most men are gay holds true. That or they’re hetero and being pursued by 30 women who spend all day talking about cock with a bunch of girls and gays. Poor, poor, men. I used to think I might meet men at my writers’ group but they are all mental and write stories about rape fantasies or Ted Hughes’ ghost haunting them. And of course I could meet men through my friends, but if you watched my video, then you’ll know that I only really know gay men and they seem to only know gay men, and short of becoming a gay man myself, it’s a dead end.

So bugger off my mother’s friend. I’m going to keep going to bars and meeting men and I’m going to keep being single until one of them turns out to be a keeper and you can keep on being a nosey bitch, but next time you ask that question, you might not like the answer.

Photo of Studio 54 by Bob Collacello, photo of Lara Stone from The Fashion Spot.

Six months or so ago I quit the internet. Technically I just left Facebook and Twitter but that constitutes 90% the internet so it’s the same thing to me. As an intensely competitive person I was spending too much time trying to figure out whether my life tallied up to that of my old school friends. In my head lived a constantly updated bar graph where points were earned and lost according to how well you were doing in your work, love, and social life. Every time I logged on it felt like the game was bogging me down with pluses for beautiful children and minuses for going to All Bar One after work. Turning on my computer was a depressing chore.

Worse than the game was my secret shame: stalking boys. Everyone’s looked someone up once or twice. You might have even googled someone’s name to see if they were a registered paedo or really into WoW. That’s all fair game. Once I start though I can’t stop. It’s not just boys: once I was searching for Jean Varon dresses on ebay and found a girl who looked familiar. After 30 minutes of searching I found out she was the child of a Tatler regular and where she worked. See? My stalking is inclusive! Everyone can get involved! It’s a multi-cultural multi-denominational multi-sexual kind of thing!

Upon my shameful return to Facebook I vowed that I would not make the same mistakes again. No more late nights figuring out our mutal friends or squinting through 10 pages of party pictures, none. But like an alcoholic who reckons they can have that one glass of champagne and still be fine, I slipped. During a bout of insomnia I found myself searching for my first ever boyfriend. Then random boys I’d crushed out over the years. Then someone who was a friend of an ex’s friend. Then someone who had looked hot in a photo of said ex’s friend’s friend. I developed e-crushes on them and started checking their profile when I was bored at work. Seeing what they were up to, whether we were going to any of the same events, that sort of thing. I tried to guess if they were single by how close girls stood to them. People I had never met became real-er than real. My own friends barely seemed as close as these boys with Flickrs, Twitters, Tumblrs, Last.fm’s, and Facebook pages constantly pinging the world with their every move. It didn’t feel wrong, not at all. Not even a tiny bit.

And then I would see them in the street and suddenly it was back to square one. They were still a pretty boy who didn’t know me and I was a pretty mental girl who knew what they ate for lunch. All the information gathering I’d done was useless because I couldn’t admit to it. What could I say that wouldn’t be creepy? “So, you like Chris Ware? Me too!” or “Did you see HEALTH play the other day? I missed them.” For fuckssake it freaks me out when my friends remember what I put on Twitter, never mind strangers.

The more I checked-in on these boys the quicker my crush wilted: the more irritating they seemed and like a real relationship it faded and died before it had time to be anything good at all. After 2 months back on Facebook I got bored and started hunting for Jean Varon dresses anew. Everything was rosy. I felt like a normal non-psychotic person again and then I met my kryptonite: the boy who cannot be found. The most recent photo I can find of him is from 2 years ago. No matter what clever scheme I hit on I can’t find him; after 2007 he just disappears. My competetive nature has me combing my brain, and Facebook, for clues, pictures he might be in, places he might have been, and nothing nothing nothing.

Though it burns so bad to even consider admitting defeat I think I am going to have to. And next time I see him I’ve promised myself I’ll say hello and ask if he wants to talk about Uncanny X-Men.

Photos by Richard Kern and Marija Strajnic.